We’re talking about books to read about Gandhi, but it’s hard to do without mentioning your own biography. There is the volume that covers Gandhi’s years in South Africa, Gandhi Before India, and then there is another volume of over 900 pages, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, which covers the period from 1914 to his death in 1948. If I’m not that familiar with Gandhi, can you tell us why he is so important and why we need to know about him?
we need to hear from him for many reasons. One is that he is considered the father of the Indian nation, and India is the largest democracy in the world and the second most populous country. he is the leading national figure in india, comparable to, say, lincoln and jefferson in the us, de gaulle in france, churchill in the uk, mao in china, ho chi minh in vietnam, etc. he was the preeminent nationalist leader of one of the most important and largest countries in the world.
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but he was much more than a mere political leader. he was also a moral philosopher who gave the world a particular technique for combating injustice, namely nonviolent protest. he called this technique “satyagraha”, or “truth force”, and it has been followed and adopted in many countries around the world since his death, including in the united states.
gandhi was also a very interesting thinker in matters of religion. he lived, and in fact died, for the harmony between the two main religious communities of India, the Hindu and the Muslim. At a time when the world is divided by discord and disharmony among religious communities, I think Gandhi is relevant.
He lived a long life, almost 80 years, during which time he studied and worked in three countries, three continents: in the UK and South Africa, as well as in India. he wrote a lot: his collected works reach 90 volumes. his autobiography was translated into more than 40 languages. An early political text he wrote, called Hindu Swaraj, is still taught in universities around the world. so he was a thinker and writer as well as being an activist, which is not that common.
and it was also controversial. there were people who debated with him in india and abroad. there were people who disagreed with his political views, his views on religion, his views on social reform.
He was a person who touched many aspects of the social and political life of the 20th century. The issues she was dealing with are still alive with us today, not just in India, but all over the world. That is why it is so interesting and important. I wanted to write about him all my life.
I thought it was funny in your book: you write that your shadow has haunted you all your life. even when you were writing a social history of cricket, he showed up, even though gandhi hated cricket.
I would say it was more that he was masterfully indifferent to cricket, which is in a way worse than hating something. he was profoundly indifferent to movies, cricket and even music. he was not someone who had a highly developed aesthetic side.
As I say in the book, regardless of what I wrote, he was there, somewhere in the background and sometimes in the foreground. finally, I thought, ‘let me settle my accounts with him’. I was also fortunate in that a large number of archival documents relating to his life had recently been opened, perhaps allowing me to give more nuance and detail than previous scholars. done.
i first heard about gandhi when i was quite young and the movie about him came out, directed by richard attenborough. If you don’t know anything about Gandhi, is this a good starting point, in your opinion?
I approve in a qualified sense. It is a story well told. some of the acting is very good. ben kingsley in the title role, in particular, is absolutely stunning. He gives the outlines of Gandhi’s political life and his fight against the British quite accurately. he also talks about his family life and his problems with his wife.
but of course it’s a feature film so you have to work out all the complexities. For example, one of Gandhi’s oldest and greatest antagonists was a remarkable leader named Brambedkar, who came from an untouchable background. he’s completely lost in the movie, because if you include him, the story is too complicated to be told in a cute, Hollywood-style, good guy/bad guy way.
“attenborough gandhi is a good place to start because it’s a well told story, the acting is good and the cinematography is splendid, but it’s a very clear line”
Instead, the film brings in Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, as the common villain, almost inevitably, because Jinnah divided India into two countries and based his politics on religion. it was narrow and divisive, and Gandhi, who thought Hindus and Muslims could live together, objected. So it’s understandable why Jinnah appears, but Ambedkar was just as important in Gandhi’s life. the man with whom he fought for so long and with so much energy has disappeared.
so yes, attenborough gandhi is a good place to start because it’s a well told story, the acting is good and the cinematography is splendid, but it’s a very clear line. nuances, nuances and ambiguities are missing.
your biography of gandhi obviously gives a much more complete picture of him, but it is also trying to give a balanced picture, I understand. you’re an admirer of gandhi, but you also try very hard to give the other side, don’t you?
a lot, because the job of a scholar, and of a biographer in particular, is not to suppress anything. Anything you find that is of interest or importance should be included, even if it makes him uncomfortable or makes his story less compelling or newsworthy.
Of course I greatly admire Gandhi, I wouldn’t want to spend so many years of my life working on someone with whom I was ambivalent, but I can see that in his debates with the aforementioned Ambedkar he wasn’t always right. . he could patronize this younger, more radical opponent of his.
I can also see the ways in which he manipulated the control of the congress party. he was a consummate politician and he didn’t want his main political vehicle to get out of hand. he was a political manager, in that sense. neither was he a very good husband and an absolutely disastrous father. there is much poignant correspondence between him and his first child, with whom he had a particularly troubled relationship. All my sympathies go out to the son, and I think all the sympathies of the readers will be too.
When it came to his personal life, his political life, and his ideological views, there were times when he deeply disagreed with Gandhi and deeply sympathized with those who argued with him. all this also had to be part of the story.
It is a book that does not suppress anything and that does not elude anything. There will be some people who will read this book and come away admiring Gandhi much more, and there will be others who will have a sense of uneasiness and perhaps even anguish at the new things they have discovered about Gandhi.
Let’s review the five books you’ve chosen. They’re not ranked in any particular order, but let’s start with the first on your list, which is My Days with Gandhi, by his secretary and fellow student Nirmal Kumar Bose. this book deals with the last phase of his life. could you tell me about it and explain why it is on your list of important books to read about gandhi?
I put this book by Nirmal Kumar Bose on my list because I wanted a first-hand account of Gandhi. Bose was a considerable scholar. he wrote books, edited an academic journal, and taught at universities. Although he is not as well known outside of India, he was one of the most influential anthropologists in the country and wrote about the castes and tribal regions of India.
I was also interested in gandhi. He joined the freedom movement in the 1930s, went to prison, and prepared an anthology of Gandhi’s writings. Then, in the winter of 1946-7, Gandhi was in the field in Bengal trying to bring about peace. It was a time when religious unrest was particularly savage in East Bengal and Gandhi needed an interpreter. Bose spoke Bengali and Gandhi knew about him and his writings. so bose went with it.
this was a moment where, on one level, he saw gandhi at his most heroic. here is a 77 year old man walking through the villages of east bengal. communication is horrible; there’s malaria and dysentery and all sorts of other problems. he is trying to unite Hindus and Muslims, undertaking these heroic experiments to promote peace.
at the same time, he is also experimenting with himself, because he is obsessed with his own celibacy. he wants to prove that his mind is absolutely pure by sleeping naked with a female disciple of his, a young woman who is also a distant relative of his. and he was doing this outdoors, because he never did anything behind the curtains.
As an anthropologist and biographer, Nirmal Kumar Bose saw this as interesting, but as a disciple, he was deeply upset by it and left Gandhi. he wrote some letters, to which gandhi replied.
so there’s this whole arc of nirmal kumar bose’s connection to gandhi. he is with him during this period in gandhi’s life in which he risks his life, but also indulges in experiments quite strange, peculiar and inexplicable in himself. you can see that this complicates the story much more than attenborough’s movie.
bose is baffled and disappointed by gandhi’s experiment but, in the end, remains a fan. I think the book is useful because it provides a first-hand account of Gandhi from someone who is a scholar and a writer. Bose is not just a naive and dreamy disciple, but someone who is a thinker and has an analytical mind. he wants to deeply probe the moods and anxieties of his subject.
It’s also a picture of Gandhi at a time in his life when he’s a bit isolated and disillusioned that the country is heading towards partition, isn’t it?
yes, that is also very important. Gandhi fought all his life to keep India united. From his time in South Africa onwards, he promoted Hindu-Muslim harmony. he was a Hindu himself, a deep believer and also deeply immersed in Hindu traditions. But in South Africa, his closest associates were Muslims.
in india, he tried to achieve a pact between these two large and sometimes conflicting communities. ultimately it failed, because partition happened and Hindus and Muslims turned on each other. It was an effort of will, at his age, to regain his composure, get back on track, and then set off on this march on foot through East Bengal.
all the trauma of his life, and particularly this sense of failure that he has, is not unconnected with the celibate experiment. Gandhi thought that because he was not absolutely pure in his own mind, and had not completely mastered his own sexual drives, he was in some way responsible for the fact that society was turning against itself. It was an article of faith, perhaps even an egotistical delusion that Gandhi had, that social peace depended on his inner purity.
there is all this pathos in gandhi’s last months, but bose, of course, is not a novelist. he is an anthropologist. his writing is factual and dispassionate. if a playwright had to deal with those last months, he would write something very different and more dramatic, more emotional. Some people may feel that Bose’s book is rather clinical and academic, but it is a real first-hand account and that is its value.
let’s move on to the next book you’ve chosen, which is a week with gandhi by louis fischer. he was an american journalist who visited gandhi at his ashram in 1942. tell me more.
Louis Fischer wrote more than one book on Gandhi. He also wrote a biography of Gandhi called The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which was published after Gandhi’s death. That book was the basis for Attenborough’s movie. I didn’t want that book; I wanted something more from fischer. This book is set in 1942, once again a time of great political turmoil and anxiety. the second world war was underway.
Let’s go back to give some context. by 1937 the national movement had long been underway, and the British made several major concessions. there was a partial devolution of powers to the Indians and there were congressional governments in seven of the nine provinces. if world war ii had not happened, india would probably have become independent in the same way that canada, new zealand, or south africa did. India would have slowly shed British rule and may still owe some token allegiance to the crown, as Australia or Canada do.
However, the war completely altered the countryside because the British had their backs to the wall. this is a time, 1939, 1940, 1941, when the Americans had not yet entered the war and the British were fighting alone. Even the Soviets didn’t come in until 1941. At that time, the British didn’t care at all about Indian independence; all they wanted was to save their own skin and defeat hitler.
gandhi and congress faced a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, for all his political differences with the imperial government, Gandhi had enormous personal sympathy with the British people. he had many British friends; he had studied in london, and he loved london to the point of distraction. When the Luftwaffe bombed London, he actually wept at the thought of Westminster Abbey under the German bombs.
gandhi was ready to abandon his doctrinal commitment to nonviolence and tell the british “hitler is evil, he must be defeated, we will help you defeat him”. vehicle, led by gandhi and nehru. they told the British, ‘we will work with you, but you must assure us that you will grant us independence once the war is over.’ In my opinion, this was a very reasonable condition, because if the British were fighting for freedom, then surely that meant freedom for the Indians too?
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this was rejected by the then prime minister, winston churchill, who was a staunch imperialist and whose viceroy in india, linlithgow, was as reactionary as churchill was.
so here is gandhi in india wondering, ‘what do i do? I want to help the British, but I want my people to be free.” Americans sympathize with their plight. fischer goes to india in 1942, at a time when gandhi tells the british: “if you don’t assure us of freedom, i will launch another protest movement across the country against your government”. ; fischer visits just before that.
He goes to Gandhi’s ashram in central India. Unlike Nirmal Kumar Bose, Fischer is a journalist and a keen observer. he is concerned less with analysis and more with description. so there is a very rich and informative account of the ashram, of gandhi’s rural settlement, what daily life was like, what the food was like. the food was awful. after a week of eating pumpkin and boiled vegetables, fischer was looking forward to returning to mumbai and enjoying a nice meal at the taj mahal hotel.
Fischer describes Gandhi’s entourage, the men and women around him, his wife, his disciples, and then talks with Gandhi. it is an unusually frank and open conversation. As Fischer says later in the book, one of the pleasures of talking to Gandhi is that he is not prearranged. when you talk to other politicians, he says, it’s like turning on a phonogram. you listen to these common metaphors, and a certain type of rhetoric: it is a speech practiced, programmed and rehearsed. but when you talk to gandhi, it’s a conversation. you are opening new lines of thought, and Gandhi himself is so open and transparent and reacts so spontaneously that he sometimes says things that surprise himself.
The book conveys Gandhi’s essential humanity and realistic character. he lived in this simple village community, with poor food and no modern conveniences at all.
I really like this book because it’s Gandhi up close. I wanted Bose and Fischer on my list: one Indian, one American, one academic, one journalist, meeting Gandhi at different points in his life: 1942 for Fischer, 1946/47 for Bose. Both were critical periods in Gandhi’s life and in world history. I wanted to juxtapose an Indian first-hand account of Gandhi’s life with a non-Indian first-hand account of Gandhi’s life.
The other three books I have chosen are not first-hand accounts. they rely more on documentation and scholarship.
one last thing about fischer that may be of interest to your readers with a more general interest in the history of 20th century politics: fischer started out as a communist. he spent many years in russia and married a russian woman. he was fluent in Russian and, like several American journalists of his day, he was quite gullible about the Russian revolution. But then Stalin’s brutality opened his eyes and he came back to Gandhi, so to speak.
Fischer was one of the contributors to the volume called The God That Failed, along with Arthur Koestler and other writers who were disenchanted by Communism.
then fischer is a person with extensive international experience. he has lived in russia, he has traveled through europe and then he discovers gandhi in india. So from that point of view, I think his book is particularly useful.
something that comes up quite a bit in this book is gandhi’s emphasis on spinning. he’s always trying to get people to do more spinning. could you explain what all that is about?
There are three main aspects to this. One is that spinning is a way of breaking down the boundaries between mental and manual labor and dissolving caste distinctions. In India’s caste system, upper caste Brahmins read books and serve as temple priests, and Kshatriyas own land, give orders, and fight war. then you have the vaishyas, who are businessmen. it is only the shudras and the untouchables, the fourth and fifth strata, who do manual labor. Manual labor is despised in India’s caste system, and Gandhi meant that everyone should work with their hands.
The second aspect is that Gandhi believed in economic self-sufficiency. An important factor in India’s underdevelopment was that its indigenous industries had been destroyed under British colonial rule. we were importing fabrics from england, particularly from manchester. so this was a way of saying, ‘we will weave our own cloth and do it ourselves using decentralized methods’. each of us will spin something.’
The third aspect is that he is cultivating a spirit of solidarity among his fellow freedom fighters, and turning is a way of doing it in a constructive and non-violent way. How do fascists instill solidarity among the community? marching up and down to show their enemies how threatening they can be. consider weaving the Gandhian alternative to a fascist march.
that’s how you should read gandhi’s interest in, you might even say obsession with, spinning. it was at once a program of social equality, the breaking down of caste distinctions, economic self-renewal, and nationalist unity: everyone will do the same.
but as a program for economic renewal i.e. you have also written a much appreciated book on india after gandhi, don’t you think gandhi was sending the country in the wrong direction economically?
well, he was rejected by his own closest disciple and anointed heir, jawaharlal nehru. When India became independent, Nehru set the country firmly on the path of economic modernization, which included industrialization.
but he wasn’t totally rejected by another of gandhi’s followers (who has a cameo in my book), a remarkable woman named kamaladevi chattopadhyay. She was the one who persuaded Gandhi that women should also join the Salt March. And after Gandhi’s death, while Nehru led the state in the direction of planned economic industrial development, Kamaladevi helped revive India’s craft traditions. Some of our textile and hand-woven crafts are due to Gandhi’s emphasis on spinning and to Kamaladevi, her pre-eminent disciple. she really was quite a remarkable person who deserves a good biography of her own.
after gandhi’s death, she was in a sense the founder of india’s civil society movement: how to organize people into cooperatives, how to nurture and revive dying craft traditions. some of that continues. I would say that even economically it was not a complete failure, although you are correct that it was largely shunned after independence because india went the route of steel plants, roads, factories etc.
let’s move on to the third book on your list, which is by dennis dalton.
dennis dalton is a retired american teacher who is now in his eighties. I never met him, but I have admired his work for a long, long time. He did a Ph.D. in England in the 1960s and later taught in Columbia. In the 1970s and 1980s he wrote a series of pioneering articles on Gandhi, which made a great impression on me when I read them. Those articles later became the basis for this book, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action, the third of five that I have recommended.
I want to talk a little bit about the characteristics of Dalton’s job and why it’s particularly important. The first thing is that it is absolutely based on primary research. Unlike other Gandhi scholars, Dalton does not limit himself to the complete works. there are 90 volumes of gandhi’s own writings and it is very easy to write a book, or indeed many books, just based on analyzing and re-analysing what gandhi himself said. Dalton, while he knows Gandhi’s collected writings very well, he also looks at contemporary newspapers and what they said about Gandhi.
also discusses what gandhi’s political rivals and adversaries were writing about. In his book, he has a very interesting account of the Indian revolutionaries who despised non-violence and thought that armed struggle would be more effective and quicker to drive out the British. they saw nonviolence as something weak, feminine, etc., a kind of macho attack on gandhi’s nonviolence. he talks about ambedkar, the great low caste revolutionary who disagreed with gandhi. the book also has two very good settings: an excellent account of the salt march and also gandhi’s great fast of september 1947, which brought peace to calcutta.
“be it gandhi, marx, hobbes or mill, any great political thinker lives his life day by day and adapts and changes his views”
another interesting thing about dalton’s work, and this is very, very important, is that he looks at the evolution of gandhi’s thought. because a life is lived day by day. Be it Gandhi, Marx, Hobbes or Mill, any great political thinker lives his life from day to day and adapts and changes his views. those who do not observe the evolution of a life, who do not have a historical, chronological or evolutionary understanding of a life, are forced to choose. they want consistencies that don’t exist.
dalton shows the evolution of gandhi’s views. For example, he shows that Gandhi had very conservative views on caste and race, but how he eventually shed his prejudices and came to a broader, more universalistic understanding of humanity. It’s a good corrective for those ideologues who want to make a particular case and selectively quote Gandhi from that earlier period of his life.
so i think that as an account of the development of gandhi’s political philosophy and as an analysis of gandhi’s indian critics, who had serious, profound, and sometimes revealing political disagreements with gandhi, dalton’s book is particularly valuable.
is also drawing attention to the efficacy of nonviolent protest. to quote from the book, “nonviolent power in action defined his career: the creative ways he used it thrill the world today.” There is the question of the continuing relevance of Gandhi’s methods.
yes, and to further elaborate on that point, the last chapter of dalton’s book, before the conclusion, is called “mohandas, malcolm and martin”. talks about gandhi’s legacy in 20th century america and what malcolm x didn’t take from gandhi and what martin luther king took from gandhi. There is an analysis of the ways in which the influence of Gandhi’s legacy can be traced to Martin Luther King and race relations in America. The book came out in the early 1990s, so it was a bit early to assess Gandhi’s impact in Eastern Europe, but he had an impact there too. Solidarity leaders, particularly thinkers like Adam Michnik, the great Polish writer, acknowledged their debt to Gandhi.
dalton is telling you how particularly relevant Gandhi’s technique of shaming the oppressor through nonviolent civil disobedience can be.
Do you think nonviolence worked particularly well against the British? gandhi knew the british empire very well, as is very clear when reading your book: she only returned to india when she was already 45 years old. so he knew a lot about the way the British thought and the way the British empire worked. Do you think his knowledge of who he was fighting to free the Indian woman helped him realize that technique would work, when he might not under all circumstances?
I think you’re right on the first point, that nonviolence might work against the British, while it might not have worked against a more brutal oppressor. there is a nice story, possibly apocryphal but worth telling, of ho chi minh who came to india in the 1950s and told a meeting in new delhi that if mahatma gandhi had been fighting the french he would have renounced non-violence in a week.
Similarly, against the dutch (who were really brutal in indonesia) or against hitler, it would be foolish to try. I have an account in my book of Gandhi advocating non-violence to resist Hitler and the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber disagreeing with him, and rightly so. so yes, the British were embarrassed in a way that perhaps a more callous or cruel ruler would not have been.
It is also the case that a powerful segment of British opinion, represented by the Labor Party, has always been in favor of Indian independence. From around 1905-6, long before Gandhi returned to India, Keir Hardie committed the Labor Party to independence. Later, as the Labor Party grew in influence within Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, there was an influential constituency of politicians and intellectuals who supported the Indian freedom movement. There were writers like George Orwell, Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman, Fenner Brockway, and Vera Brittain (the noted pacifist who was Gandhi’s friend) writing in the British press about the legitimacy of India’s demand for independence. It is unclear if Ho Chi Minh had similar people lobbying for him in France. So it is true that non-violence stood a better chance against the British compared to the Dutch in Indonesia or the French in Vietnam.
“There is a moral core to Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. he is trying to shame the oppressor instead of removing the oppressor from existence.”
Having said all that, it wasn’t just tactical. There is a moral core to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence. he is trying to shame the oppressor instead of removing the oppressor from existence. Gandhi is saying, if he were to shoot the colonial official who is oppressing me, it means that I am 100% right and he is 100% wrong. Otherwise, how am I justified in taking his life?
let me harass him, pressure him, get him in trouble, crouch outside his office, keep people out of his office and then let’s see what he says. nonviolence is also based on a moral understanding of interpersonal relationships, which says, ‘look, the guy who’s oppressing me has some humanity in him too. let me stir that up. let me try this and that and then the guy can change and we can come to a kind of mutual respect and understanding’, so it’s not just tactical, instrumental and pragmatic: there’s also a moral core to nonviolent resistance, which I think one would never must forget.
Related to that, are we going to talk about Gandhi’s religion next? This is a book called Gandhi’s Religion: A Homemade Shawl, written by a Belgian Jesuit, J T F Jordans. his point is that it is impossible to understand gandhi without his religion.
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First, a small factual correction: the author, jtfjordens, is more accurately described as a non-practicing Belgian Jesuit. He started out as a Jesuit, came to India, joined a church, and then left the church. He took an interest in Gandhi, became a scholar, and ended up as a teacher in Australia.
this is partly accidental, but if you look at the three foreign books on my list, one is by an american who lived in russia, which is fischer. The second is from an American who studied in England, who is Dalton. the third is from a belgian who ended up teaching in australia. he wanted people with a non-parochial and non-xenophobic understanding of the world. They are all very unusual people who provided very interesting perspectives on Gandhi and have written, in my opinion, three top-notch books.
coming to jordens and gandhi’s religion: gandhi was a person of faith, but he had a very idiosyncratic, individual and eccentric attitude towards faith. he called himself a Sanatanist Hindu, which means devout or orthodox Hindu, but he didn’t go to temples. he once entered a famous temple in south india, when untouchables were admitted for the first time. aside from that, he was a Hindu who never entered temples. he was a Hindu, but he radically challenged some of the prejudices of the Hindu tradition, particularly the practice of untouchability. He was a Hindu whose closest friend was an English Christian priest, cf Andrews. He was a Hindu whose political program was that Hindus should not oppress Muslims and that Muslims should have equal rights in an independent India.
Gandhi’s views on religion are very different. You’re talking about a person growing up in the late 19th century, a time when there is an outburst of rationalistic atheism, particularly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. hardy writes his poem the funeral of god because the intellectuals and scientists have turned their backs on god.
But it’s also a time of aggressive proselytizing, with Christian missionaries going to India, Muslim missionaries working in Africa, and so on.
Now, too, we live in an age of intellectuals who disparage religion, with arrogant atheism on the one hand and religious fundamentalism on the other. Gandhi gives us a way out of this false choice. Gandhi tells us that you can be religious, that there is wonder and mystery in life that science and cold-blooded rationality cannot fully explain.
but, at the same time, there is no single true path to god. Gandhi says, accept your fate. You were born a Hindu, fine. your parents, your grandparents were Hindus for many generations. but think about what you can learn from other religions. cultivate friendships with Christians and Muslims and Jews and Parsees. if you see your faith in the mirror of another, you can discover its imperfections. it’s a very interesting and unorthodox approach to religion.
But religion was central to Gandhi’s life. I don’t talk about him in my biography, but when I was very young, in my early 20s, I went through a phase where I wanted to secularize Gandhi. I was raised an atheist. my father and grandfather were scientists and I had never been to the temples. when i got interested in gandhi, i thought, all this religious stuff is a distraction. what is really relevant about gandhi is equal rights for low castes, equality for women, non-violence, democracy and economic self-sufficiency. let me try and have gandhi without faith.
but i finally realized that it was useless and would not give me a ready window to understand gandhi, because gandhi was a person of faith. he is someone who cares a lot about religion, but although he calls himself a Hindu, he is a rebel against orthodoxy. There is a wonderful passage where a Christian disciple of his was expelled by the church (Verrier Elvin, about whom I wrote a book many years ago). he writes to gandhi telling him that his bishop has excommunicated him. Gandhi responds by saying that it doesn’t matter, that his altar is the sky and his pulpit is the ground below him. you can still communicate with jesus without being in a church. In this, Gandhi is influenced of course by Tolstoy and his writings, Tolstoy’s sense, as he says, that the kingdom of God is within you.
i believe jordens book is the most scrupulous, unbiased and persuasive account of why faith is so central to gandhi and what makes gandhi’s faith so distinctive. that’s why it’s on my list.
and ultimately we should point out that gandhi was assassinated by a hindu for being too nice to muslims.
absolutely.
and that gandhi focus on celibacy, does that come from religion?
Celibacy, or the struggle to conquer your sexual desires, is prevalent in several religious traditions: Catholicism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, and is totally absent in some other religious traditions: Islam, Protestant Christianity, and Judaism. The idea that you should avoid sexual pleasures and that would bring you closer to God is part of Buddhism, Catholicism, and Hinduism, but it is totally antithetical or alien to Islam, Judaism, and the modern world.
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, an American scholar named Joseph Lelyveld wrote a book in which he suggested that Gandhi was gay. Gandhi had a close Jewish friend named Hermann Kallenbach, with whom he lived in South Africa. both were followers of tolstoy and both wanted to be celibate. Lelyveld could not understand why two people who lived together wanted to be celibate, so he concluded that they were homosexual. The litmus test for him was a letter Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach when Gandhi was in London, temporarily separated from his friend and housemate. he wrote to kallenbach saying, there’s a bottle of vaseline on my mantelpiece and it reminds me of you. The American scholar jumped to a very quick conclusion, but the Vaseline bottle was actually there because both Gandhi and Kallenbach had taken a Tolstoyan vow not to wear shoes. they walked barefoot or in slippers and in london they were getting calluses on their feet.
a modern man like joseph lelyveld, a 21st century writer who lives in new york and attends gay pride parades every year, cannot understand that men want to be celibate voluntarily, and not because they are forced to. but this was not, as is the case in many countries around the world, an eight-year-old boy who is sent to a seminary and told to become a priest. kallenbach was a successful architect, gandhi was a successful lawyer. Both were inspired by Tolstoy, the successful novelist, to drop everything and live a simple life. I had a lot of fun in my first volume, Gandhi Before India, writing a two-page footnote addressing the Joseph Lelyveld misunderstanding.
but the point is that celibacy is present in hinduism and also in jainism, an allied religion to which gandhi was quite close, because as a native gujarati he had many close jain friends. Jain monks are absolutely committed to this type of sexual abstinence. so it was a central part of their religious beliefs. it comes from their faith and is something modern men and women just can’t fathom.
but despite gandhi’s religious open-mindedness, he did not allow his son to marry a muslim.
yes, but that was for pragmatic political reasons. she was working in a very conservative society, where for the first time she was bringing Hindus and Muslims together on a political platform. had there been intermarriage, she would have derailed the political movement, because Islamic preachers would have accused her son of capturing a Muslim girl, etc. this was in the 1920s, a hundred years ago. I’m sure she wouldn’t have any objections today.
That leads us nicely to his latest book. gandhi was a man who always put the political and the public before his private life. and, as you said before, the result is that he treated his family quite badly. the last book on his list is a life of his son harilal of him. it’s called harilal gandhi: a life. some quotes from his son that appear in the book: “we were ignored” and “you have spoken to us not with love, but always with anger”. it’s very sad isn’t it? Tell me about his son and this book.
this was a book written in gujarati by a scholar named chandulal bhagubhai dalal and translated into english by one of the foremost indian gandhian scholars of the day, tridip suhrud, who was, for many years, the curator of the personal archive of gandhi in ahmedabad suhrud has provided a very detailed introduction and notes, making it a very good edition of this biography.
To put things in context again, Gandhi married very young. He married in his teens and had his first child, Harilal, in 1888 when he was not yet 20 years old. Shortly after his Harilal was born, Gandhi leaves for London to pursue a law degree. so he is absent for the first two years of his son’s life. he then he comes back and spends a year and a bit in india and then he goes again to south africa to earn a living and leaves his wife and children behind. then after a few years his wife and children join him in south africa. but then harilal, the eldest son, is sent back to india to enroll. therefore, during many of the formative years of harilal growth, the father of him is absent.
also, because gandhi has his son so early, when harilal reaches middle age and is thinking about his own career and his own future, gandhi is himself in his thirties. gandhi is having his mid-life crisis. he is abandoning his career as a prosperous lawyer to become a full-time social activist. At the same time, Harilal is having his teenage meltdown.
Now, I don’t want to involve the biographer, but if I were to look at myself, like many people, I also had a mid-life crisis. when I was 36 or 37 I quit a job at the university and became a freelance writer. I said to hell with institutions and tutorials, I just want to be alone. when that happened, my son was four years old, because he had had it when he was in his early 30s. In Gandhi’s case, unfortunately, his own midlife crisis and career change coincided with his son’s adolescent crisis. and this, in part, was responsible for the crash. gandhi is telling his son, go to jail. follow me, become a social worker, he gives everything for the community as I have done. and the son says, hey, but when you were my age you went to london to be a lawyer. why can’t i go to london and be a lawyer too?
and gandhi is profoundly indifferent to his son’s hopes, his wishes. it is also the case that the son has a love marriage, which gandhi really does not approve of. the son is devoted to his wife but the wife dies leaving him deprived of her emotional anchor.
gandhi becomes increasingly angry, critical and frustrated that his son does not do what he wants him to do. and harilal is broken by this. on one level, he resents his father’s domineering and overbearing manner and, on another level, he craves his father’s attention. so harilal goes to jail several times in south africa and also several times in india because he wants his father to know that he is as patriotic as anyone else.
The child tries to enroll several times, but fails. his wife dies. he then tries several times to become a businessman, but all of his business ventures fail. he then he becomes an alcoholic, then he becomes an inactive alcoholic, then he goes back to the bottle. then because he is so angry with his father, he converts to islam just to spite gandhi. This leads to a very distraught letter from his mother, Kasturba Gandhi. she is rarely in the public domain, but she is so angry at his son’s spiteful act that she writes in the press saying why are you doing this just to embarrass your father?
so it’s a very tragic and complicated relationship and of course it’s not unusual. many motivated and successful people are not very good husbands or fathers. modern history is replete with such examples. but in gandhi’s case, because we have this dalal book, we can read all his letters. we can see the exchanges between father and son, the general lack of understanding and the creeping anger and exasperation at the end of gandhi and the anger and resentment at the end of the son. everything comes out very vivid in this story.
again, this is a factual account. it is written by a scholar who wants to tell you the unvarnished, objective and dispassionate truth. but I think it’s very effective because it doesn’t overwrite or exaggerate or exaggerate or over-judge.
and harilal isn’t going to gandhi’s funeral, right? he was so estranged from his father that he didn’t go?
He wanted to go to the funeral, actually. there is a version that the news came too late and that he went to delhi. but it is a very sad story. We talked earlier about the attenborough movie. there is also a very nice movie based on this book called gandhi, my father. is a feature film, made in english, by fierce indian director abbas khan. It started as a play. so it was a play and then a movie about this very complicated and tormented relationship between the father of the nation and his own son. I urge readers to watch the movie because it’s so good.
one last question: you did not include gandhi’s autobiography in this list of books. Is it because you wanted them to be books about him instead of written by him, or was there a more fundamental reason?
Gandhi’s autobiography is indispensable, but it is well known. is available in hundreds of editions and in dozens of languages. all major publishers have published it and you can get it anywhere. he wanted readers of five books to gain fresher, more vivid, and lesser-known perspectives on Gandhi.
but certainly, you should also read the autobiography. It is now available in a new annotated edition by the scholar I mentioned, Tridip Suhrud. It is a premier edition published by Yale University Press.
And the autobiography is very readable, isn’t it?
yes, gandhi was a master of english and gujarati prose. he transformed the Gujarati script. he wrote beautiful, economical, clear prose, without affectation or pomposity. he was a wonderful writer.
In the course of my research for my first volume on Gandhi, one of my most pleasant discoveries was an obscure book published in the 1960s that compiled Gandhi’s school notes. Someone discovered that when Gandhi enrolled in school, he scored 44% in English and about the same in Gujarati. So I always use this example when I speak at universities in India: Here is a teacher of Gujarati and English who got only 44% in his exams.
The autobiography was written in Gujarati but later translated by Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, who was also a remarkable man. but since autobiography is so well known and so easily and widely available, I thought I should recommend some other books.
See Also: Lilian Jackson Braun – Book Series In Order